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Review of Komorebi ni Yureru Tamashii no Koe

SubjectKomorebi ni Yureru Tamashii no Koe
Komorebi ni Yureru Tamashii no Koe - Memorial Edition (Low Price Edition)
ByHelpfulness: 3
Vote: 5
funnerific on 2023-05-30
ReviewI'll start with what should be the most interesting part: the technical horrors of this 2003 game.

1. Game launches automatically once installed, without warning or an option to disable that. In fullscreen.
2. Can't go into menu to put it in windowed mode until you click "start". "Load" also works, because it's the same screen, but it requires having a save first.
3. Can't launch the game without a disk in the drive.
4. No auto-mode.
5. There are only two working device controls: the left mouse button, and CTRL for skip. No other key works, not even ESC or Enter, and the right mouse button doesn't either.
6. Text appears row-by-row instead of moji-by-moji (so the top one appears first, all at once, then the middle one...)
7. Clicking when the text hasn't finished displaying yet takes you to the next line, instead of instantly displaying the current one. Additionally, the only choice of text display speed is "normal" and "instant".
8. The game reacts to CTRL being pressed regardless of the state of the game window. Even if it's minimized or simply out of focus, the game will still skip text every time you press CTRL — unless you enter the menu or backlog first.
9. The game saves at the nearest "checkpoint" instead of the current line, so it will often put you back a bit. Can't say I ever found it to be a problem, though.
10. Textractor doesn't work, but the AGTH setup described in link does. Tfw have to download such ancient software in 2023.

But there is one technical thing it did surprisingly well for its time: a CG in one scene has blinking "animations", which are actually scripted to happen at certain points in the narration, rather than after a period of time. It makes the three heroines in it blink at different points in time, which looks nice.


For the most part, this game has aged rather poorly. But not in everything: the heroine sprites are highly expressive, the CG count is high, and the non-H art quality is fairly good. HCGs not so much, as they feel somewhat random and often don't match what's currently happening in the text. Also, most blowjob scenes have the D in stealth mode. The BGM is decent, but the sound effects are pretty bad. Many of them sound very wrong, and some are looped for a long time and are pretty distracting.

I really wish this game was more like it is on the cover instead of going into sci-fi and having the protag and two of the main heroines (Ayana and Sui) born in tubes. The common route is long and boring, and there's no humor, while the heroine routes are all pretty short and oversaturated with drama, which I didn't find to be of high quality. The writing can get pretty dumb: at one point, there's a fire, it goes on for maybe 10 minutes and the flames reach an adult's height by the time the protag discovers it. He uses a hose to try to put it out—to no avail—but then (and for some reason only then) the sprinklers come on and douse it. And the protag is like "thank goodness, I managed to protect everyone" and the heroines are like "you protected us, how kakkoii!" — but it was just the sprinklers...


There's a lot of choices in this game, many of them unobvious, and for once I recommend using a walkthrough because it looks like getting any choice in the common route wrong will put you on the path to a heroine's bad end.

The routes vary in quality. Ayana's is the most bearable one. It's still overdramatized and ridiculous (Heroine: "Ah, I'm so miserable, nobody needs me!", Protag: "Actually, I have no real place to call home sadface", Heroine "Oh, I'll be your kaeru basho, protag!" — sex and happy end), but at least it's not as bad as the other main routes.

Sui route has you "romance" a mental toddler in the body of an eight-year-old, who, despite being super clueless about literally everything, inexplicably initiates the sex scenes without having any idea of what she's doing, because the author couldn't think of any logical way to hook her up with a gentle protag who understandably feels reluctant about making a move on an innocent girl like her, or even having any romantic feelings towards her in the first place.

Koharu route... Oh god why... Nowhere else is the game as obviously 2003 as here, because, very surprisingly, it's a total rapefest, with one of those scenes (where the heroine gets raped in the mouth) being unavoidable even if you're headed for the good end. The protag has an alter ego that doesn't appear in any other part of the game but surfaces in this one. If you're headed for the bad end, there's 3 scenes in total, and the third one involves vaginal sex, after which the heroine just lies on the floor broken with vacant eyes, and the protag drowns himself in a lake. So much for a sweet-looking game...

There's also Mao and Tsubaki routes, but they're extremely short, and Mao doesn't even have romance, just a random sex scene.


P.S. The plot premise of the game reminded me of Cynthia a fair bit: Grown-up guy comes from a distant place to a mansion where 3 girls live, one of which is a super weird loli (Komorebi's hyper-ignorant Sui, Cynthia's titular feral child). I liked that game quite a lot more than this one.
3 points
#1 by barfboy
2023-08-08 at 16:44
< report >I found this game to be incredibly good and entirely beyond my ability. I'm 100% self taught in Japanese. I literally picked up a dictionary one day to play Princess Maker 3 and I've been going since but that means I really struggle with anything beyond nukige. Which is why I understand spoken Japanese so much better than what's displayed on the screen and why 50% of the time I just listen to it in the background while doing something else. I'm just not getting much from the characters on the screen.

That said, from what I very slowly tried desperately to read many years ago was excellent. Thank you very much for this review.